The rescue of a buried victim is one of the most perilous tasks confronting emergency response personnel. As many as 65% of all deaths from engulfment accidents are the result of rescuers who themselves have been buried and perished in the course of rescue operations. Trench collapses are particularly dangerous, time-consuming, labor-intensive and technically demanding. Since a single cubic foot of soil can weigh as much as 145 pounds it is often necessary to completely expose the victim before it is possible to free or remove the victim from the engulfment site.
To further complicate matters, the rescue of a buried victim is often a race against time. The longer the victim is buried, the greater the likelihood the victim will suffer or die from crush syndrome, internal traumatic injuries, hypothermia or suffocation. Thus, rescuers face the dilemma whether to proceed slowly and cautiously for their own safety or quickly in the hope of saving a victim's life.
Manual excavation techniques, such as the use of hands, shovels and picks do little to resolve this dilemma. Manual excavation is excessively time-consuming even in situations where the location of the buried victim is known at the onset of rescue operations. In addition, manual techniques quickly fatigue rescue workers diminishing their alertness and subjecting them to the risk of a subsequent collapse as the result of careless conduct.
Hydraulic excavation equipment, such as a backhoe, is capable of excavating a large amount of engulfing material very quickly. This type of equipment, however, poses far too great a safety risk to both the victim and rescue personnel to be practically applied to rescue operations. A backhoe can easily crush or otherwise seriously injure or mutilate a buried victim without the operator knowing it. The weight of such equipment on the area surrounding the excavation site also causes deleterious vibrations and imposes extra loads on the surrounding areas of the already unstable engulfment site creating risk of further ground collapse and entrapment of rescue personnel.
A need therefore exists for an effective rescue technique for rescuing a victim entrapped in engulfment material. A need further exists for a trench rescue device and method that minimizes the hazards to rescuers working at the engulfment site.